Politics

As a Canadian, and one of libertarian bent, I hope I have a better perspective on the two parties in the USA. What I see does not bode well for the Democrats. I think they understand the Republican side poorly, worse than the Republicans understand them. And, over the last two elections, they have shown little willingness to learn about it.

I think George W. Bush is the worst president in living memory, perhaps the worst ever, and that this was clear by 2004. Yet more democrats voted for Bush than republicans voted for Kerry. Why was that? Many republicans also reported holding their noses and voting for Bush — they knew he was a bad President but couldn’t stomach Kerry. Why was that?

Something that played a larger role than people think was attitude. I may get a bias because I hang around with democrats more, but they exude an attitude of complete derision. It is not that Bush doesn’t deserve derision; it’s just that it is a terrible marketing strategy. “You haven’t just supported the wrong candidate, you’re a complete idiot because you’ve supported a stupid candidate, one whom anybody with any brains can see is a complete fool.” This approach doesn’t win votes. Quite the reverse, I think it causes the other side to close ranks and distrust the messenger. Nobody believes themselves to be a fool. If somebody tells you what a fool you’ve been you don’t say “oh my, what was I thinking?” You say “screw you, asshole.” And you don’t listen further.

People change their minds when evidence comes in through their own lens. Over time, more conservatives have turned on Bush and documented the problems, and his approval rating is extremely low, even among former supporters.

Now, as a practitioner of comedy, I fully feel and understand the temptation to engage in ridicule. There is great political comedy, but there really are two broad classes of it. One class is mean, and really only works on the already converted. It just offends the rest and causes them to ignore its message. The much better class of political comedy is not so bitter and can work on at least independents. We don’t get enough of that. Political comedy should be used, but with care.

(Indeed, with care it is one of the most powerful tools. I remember how Reagan, asked about his age, used the line “I refuse to let my opponent’s youth and inexperience be an issue in this election” and the age issue rarely troubled him again.)

Election-winning comedy must be able to stick in the minds of all voters, and it must not be bitter to do that. For example, when Guliani over-used 9/11 in speeches, and comedians satirized this, it played a large part in sinking him, which he didn’t understand. But it’s a joke his people can get and not find vicious.

Democrats need to do two things if they want to win:

Keep the attacks civil and less extreme. Consult with good comedians to stay on the right side of the line. Encourage the troops not to be bitter no matter how tempting.

Hire wise former (or mercenary) republicans and learn from them how to sell the message to conservatives and independents. Listen to them.

As I said, we’re coming off a Republican administration that the public knows was horrible for the country. Even the conservatives know that. Changing power in the White House should have been a true slam dunk. Making the conservatives close ranks by insulting them rather than talking to them in their own language is the way to undo the slam dunk.

Pundits like to point out when some new media technology changes seriously changed politics. When I was young, everybody talked about how the Kennedy-Nixon debates ushered in the era of the TV candidate and changed politics forever. (It did indeed seem unlikely a candidate in a wheelchair from polio could win today, but in fact in Bob Dole and John McCain we have two candidates without full use of their arms.)

No doubt when radio came into play there was similar commentary.

But now it’s more rapid. So I’ll make a prediction. Form now on, the pace of change in media and the other technologies of politics will be so rapid that every election will be different in some important way from those before it, due to technology. Some of the changes will be overhyped, some will be underhyped, but there may never again be “politics as usual” — meaning politics as they were 4 years ago.

This will be both good and bad. Most interesting to me is the cost of media. In the USA, most political corruption and influence comes because all politicians feel they must raise a huge amount of money, so much that they spend more time doing that than actually doing their jobs, and they will even admit this. They feel they need to raise this money to make media buys, in particular TV ads. So anything that breaks this equation, such as formalized political spam may have the potential for great good. As for the rest of the changes yet to come, it’s hard to say how we’ll feel about them.

Legacy politics assured that Iowa and New Hampshire would get the lead in setting the political agenda of a Presidential race. If you can't please them, it's hard to get nominated. And now they protect this position as hard as they can. Florida tried to move and got slapped.

There is a better way. There should be a lottery, or simply a rotation, on who gets to go first each time. All parties in a state would have to agree, but I can't see why not, and really all you need is the Republicans and Democrats. Hold the lottery several years in advance.

Letting states or regions be equal is probably best. I originally thought you might allocate chances by state size but in fact you don't want big states first. Only states that want to participate, and have their event early would be in the pool. Any state could participate in a super Tuesday or other such later events without having to win the lottery. Iowa and New Hampshire would not be permitted to participate in the lottery for 50 years -- they've had their say!

A rotation might be even better, though it would have to initially be set by lottery. To make the rotation go faster, depending on how many states want the position, there could be a couple of "first" slots and 3 or 4 "second" slots allowing 5-6 states to be important each time. A rotation however has a problem when one state changes its mind and wants to join the early pool.

Of course, you might ask, why not actually have a deliberative process, where the states are carefully chosen to be more of a cross section of the general public? It sounds good, but little stops this now other than party cooperation, and it hasn't taken place. Of course the parties may well feel that Iowa or New Hampshire push their opponents in ways they want them pushed, but this should balance. And Iowa is certainly not representative -- as it is now popular to point out, a lot more people play World of Warcraft and live in urban condos than are family farmers. As it stands now the parties have to field candidates who won't piss off the Iowa or NH voter too much, and that's wrong, because it may be necessary for the right candidate to take stances against the interest of these minorities.

Update: It is suggested that some states, like California, are simply too huge to do an early primary, because candidates can't yet afford to campaign somewhere that big, nor can they get intimate with the public. I agree, and so possibly the largest states would have to bow out of the system. Or perhaps they could hold mini-primaries for just a small portion of the state if they win the lottery, and the rest of the state would vote later, on a Super-Tuesday or similar. This does mean for example that the Democratic primary might be in San Francisco, and the Republican one in Orange County, surveying very different voters. The regions could compete in the lottery rather than the state, assuming the state assigns delegates by geography.

Even people outside of California have heard about proposition 13, the tax-revolt referendum which, exactly 29 years ago, changed the property tax law so that one’s property taxes only go up marginally while you own a property. Your tax base remains fixed at the price you paid for your house, with minor increments. If you sell and buy a house of similar value (or inherit in many cases) your tax basis and tax bill can jump alarmingly.

The goal of Prop 13 was that people would not find themselves with a tax bill they couldn’t handle just because soaring real estate values doubled or tripled the price of their home, as has often taken place in California. (Yes, I can hear your tears of sympathy.) In particular older people living off savings were sometimes forced to leave, always unpopular.

However, there have been negative consequences. One, it has stopped tax revenues from rising as fast as the counties like, resulting in underfunding of schools and other public programs. (This could be fixed by jacking up the rates even more on more recent buyers of homes but that has its own problems.)

Two, it generates a highly inequitable situation. Two identical families living in two identical houses — but one has a tax bill of $4,000 per year and the other has a tax bill of $15,000 per year, based entirely on when they bought or inherited their house. I would think this is unconstitutional but the courts said it is not.

Three it’s an impediment to moving (as if the realtor monopoly’s 6% scam were not enough.) There are exemptions in most counties for moves within California by seniors.

Here’s my fix: Each house would, as in most jurisdictions, be fairly appraised, and receive a tax bill based on that. Two identical houses — same tax bill. However, those who had a low basis value in their home could elect to defer some of that bill (ie. the difference between the real bill and their base bill derived from the price they paid for their home) until they sold the home. There would be interest on this unpaid amount, in effect they would be borrowing against the future equity of the home in order to have a lower tax bill. read more »

A well known curse of many representative democracies is gerrymandering. People in power draw the districts to assure they will stay in power. There are some particularly ridiculous cases in the USA.

I was recently pointed to a paper on a simple, linear system which tries to divide up a state into districts using the shortest straight line that properly divides the population. I have been doing some thinking of my own in this area so I thought I would share it. The short-line algorithm has the important attribute that it’s fixed and fairly deterministic. It chooses one solution, regardless of politics. It can’t be gamed. That is good, but it has flaws. Its district boundaries pay no attention to any geopolitical features except state borders. Lakes, rivers, mountains, highways, cities are all irrelevant to it. That’s not a bad feature in my book, though it does mean, as they recognize, that sometimes people may have a slightly unusual trek to their polling station. read more »

There’s a great tragedy going on in the Sudan, and not much is being done about it. Among the people trying to get out the message are hollywood celebrities. I am not faulting them for doing that, but I have a suggestion that is right up their alley.

Which is to make a movie to tell the story, a true movie that is, hopefully a moving as a Schinder’s List or the Pianist. Put the story in front of the first world audience.

And, I suggest with a sad dose of cynicism, do it with whitebread american actors. Not that African actors can’t do a great job and make a moving film like Hotel Rwanda. I just have a feeling that first world audiences would be more affected if they saw it happening to people like them, rather than people who live in a tiny poor muslim villages in a remote desert. The skin colour is only part of what seems to have distanced this story to the point that little is being done. We may have to never again believe that people will keep the vow of never again.

So change the setting a bit and the people, but keep the story and the atrocities, and perhaps it can have the same effect that seeing a Schindler’s list can have on white euro descended Jews and non-Jews. And the Hollywood folks would be doing exactly what they are best at.

It’s always reported how low US voter turnout is in midterm elections. 2006, at about 40%, seems pretty poor, though it was higher than 2002.

However the statistic I would like to see is “Voter turnout in districts where there is an important, hotly contested race.” This is the number we might want to monitor from year to year.

Virginia, it turns out, which had the Webb-Allen “Macaca” race, had the highest voter turnout in its history. You wouldn’t think that after hearing about the low turnout of a typical mid-term. Of course it will also go down as the first time a major U.S. politician was taken down due to blogs, the web and YouTube. Since it was so close, almost any factor can be given credit for Allen’s loss.

It is not surprising that when there is no contested race, that turnout is low. The U.S. for various bizarre reasons, has most incumbents always safe in their seats. This switch of 30 or so seats in the house and 6 in the senate is considered a major upheaval, nigh a revolution, by Americans. With seats so safe, there is no suprise there is little incentive in voting. U.S. ballots are very complex compared to many countries, and there are often long voting lines, and you don’t get official time off to vote.

Contrast that to Canada, where a public upset with the Conservative party’s introduction of the visible Goods and Services Tax (a 7% VAT) took the party from having a majority of parliament to having TWO seats. 2, as in 1 plus 1. There’s no such safety zone for incumbents, no cry for term limits in much of the rest of the world. There, if the public gets upset it throws the bums out, or drops them back to a minority position due to the fact that there are more than 2 parties.

I hope one of the major statistical agencies starts tracking voter turnout modulated by how motivated the voters are in particular districts. Of course voter turnout is the final metric of how motivated they were, but there are other, earlier indicators in most cases.

A proposal by a Stanford CS Prof for a means to switch the U.S. Presidential race from electoral college to popular vote is gaining some momentum. In short, the proposal calls for some group of states representing a majority of the electoral college to agree to an inter-state compact that they will vote their electoral votes according to the result of the popular vote.

State compacts are like treaties but are enforceable by both state courts and federal law, so this has some merit. In addition, you actually don’t even need to get 270 electoral votes in the compact. All you really need is a much smaller number of “balanced” states. For example perhaps 60 typically republican electoral votes and 60 typically democratic electoral votes. Maybe even less.
For example I think a compact with MA, IL, MN (42 Dem) and IN, AB, OK, UT, ID, KA (42 Rep) might well be enough, certainly to start.
Not that it hurts if CA, NY or TX join.

That’s because normally the electoral college already follows the popular vote. If it’s not going to, the race is very close, and a fairly small number of states in the compact would be assured to swing the electoral college to the popular vote in that case. There are a few exceptions I’ll talk about below, but largely this would work.

This is unlike proposals for states to, on their own, do things like allocate their electors based on popular vote within the state, as Maine does. Such proposals don’t gain traction because there is generally going to be somebody powerful in the state who loses under such a new rule. In a state solidly behind one party, they would be fools to effectively give electoral votes to the minority party. In a balanced state, they would be giving up their coveted “swing state” status, which causes presidential candidates to give them all the attention and election-year gifts.

Even if, somehow, many states decided to switch to a proportional college, it is an unstable situation. Suddenly, any one state that is biased towards one party (both in state government and electoral college history) is highly motivated to put their candidate over the top by switching back to winner-takes-all.

There’s merit in the popular-vote-compact because it can be joined by “safe” states, so long as a similar number of safe votes from the other side join up. The safe states resent the electoral college system, it gets them ignored. Since close races are typically decided by a single mid-sized state, even a very small compact could be surprisingly effective — just 3 or 4 states!

The current “swing state” set is AZ, AR, CO, FL, IA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NV, NH, NM, NC, OH, OR, PA, VA, WA, WV, and WI, though of course this set changes over time. However, once states commit to a compact, they will be stuck with it, even if it goes against their interests down the road.

The one thing that interferes with the small-compact is that even the giant states like New York, Texas and California can become swing states if the “other” party runs a native candidate. California in particular. (In 1984 Mondale won only Minnesota, and got just under 50% of the vote. Anything can happen.) That’s why you don’t just get an “instant effective compact” from just 3 states like California matching Texas and Indiana. But there are small sets that probably would work.

Also, a tiny compact such as I propose would not undo the “campaign only in swing states” system so easily. A candidate who worked only on swing states (and won them) could outdo the extra margin now needed because of the compact. In theory. If the compact grew (with non-swing states, annoyed at this, joining it) this would eventually fade.

Of course the next question may surprise you. Is it a good idea to switch from the electoral college system? 4 times the winner of the popular vote has lost (strangely, 3 of those have been the 3 times the winner was the son — GWB, Adams - or grandson - Harrison- of a President) the White House. The framers of the consitution, while they did not envision the two party system we see today, intended for the winner of the popular vote to be able to lose the electoral college.

When they designed the system, they wanted to protect against the idea of a “regional” president. A regional winner would be a candidate with extreme popularity in some small geographic region. Imagine a candidate able to take 90% of the vote in their home region, that region being 1/3 of the population. Imagine them being less popular in the other 2/3 of the country, only getting 31% of the vote there. This candidate wins the popular vote, but would lose the electoral college (quite solidly.) Real examples would not be so simple. The framers did not want a candidate who really represented only a small portion of the country in power. The wanted to require that a candidate have some level of national support.

The Civil War provides an example of the setting for such extreme conditions. In that sort of schism, it’s easy to imagine one region rallying around a candidate very strongly, while the rest of the nation remains unsure.

Do we reach their goal today? Perhaps not. However, we must take care before we abandon their goal to make sure it’s what we want to do.

Update: See the comments for discussion of ties. Also, I failed to discuss another important issue to me, that of 3rd parties. The electoral debacle of 2000 hurt 3rd parties a lot, with a major “Ralph don’t run” campaign that told 3rd parties, “don’t you dare run if you could actually make a difference.” A national popular vote would continue, and possibly strengthen the bias against 3rd parties. Some 3rd parties have been proposing what they call a “safe state” strategy, where they tell voters to only vote for their presidential candidate in the safe states. This allows them to demonstrate how much support they are getting (and with luck the press reports their safe-state percentage rather than national percentage) without spoiling or being accused of spoiling.

Of course, I think the answer for that would be a preferential ballot, which would have to be done on a state by state basis, and might not mesh well with the compact under discussion.

Big news today. Judge Walker has denied the motions — particularly the one by the federal government — to dismiss our case against AT&T for cooperative with the NSA on warrantless surveillance of phone traffic and records.

The federal government, including the heads of the major spy agencies, had filed a brief demanding the case be dismissed on “state secrets” grounds. This common law doctrine, which is often frighteningly successful, allows cases to be dismissed, even if they are of great merit, if following through would reveal state secrets.

This is a great step. Further application of the state secrets rule would have made legal oversight of
surveillance by spy agencies moot. We can write all the laws we want governing how spies may operate, and how surveillance is to be regulated, but if nobody can sue over violations of those laws, what purpose do they really have? Very little.

Of course I am disturbed to see that some of these apparently twisted men come from my home town of Mississauga, but I’m also bothered by the continuing expansion of the term terrorism.

To my mind, terrorism has always involved attacking ordinary innocents for the purpose of sewing terror to some polictical end. Attacking military targets, such as the Pentagon or the USS Cole, or Marine bases is not terrorism (though you can argue that the victims on the plane used in that attack on the Pentagon qualify it as terrorist, but sadly from their perspective, they more correctly fit the definition of what we euphamistically call “collateral damage.”)

Those arrested in Ontario, it was revealed, planned to attack Parliament and take the Prime Minister and others there hostage, demanding they pull troops from Afghanistan. While I make no excuse for their plans or actions, I can’t see attacking the very people who ordered the troops in as terrorism. (Though holding them hostage is.) You could call it treason (because many were Canadians or naturalized Canadians and had in the latter case taken an oath not to do this which they would have betrayed.) You could call it guerilla warfare if you accept them as legitimate guerrilla soldiers of that nation. You could call it insurrection. You could just call it conspiracy towards kidnapping and attempted murder. All of these crimes can offer Canada’s maximum penalty. (Which, by the way, is life in prison.)

But if this is terrorism, what isn’t? As noted, we’ve seen attacks such as that on the Cole, or Marine bases or the Pentagon called terrorist. Is the only thing that’s not terrorist sending in a ship with a flag on it full of uniformed fighters? Or lobbing a missile at a tall building with the major radio transmission towers on it, which is the first thing the U.S. does in its wars?

I should note that the definition of terrorism in the law they are charged under does not distinguish civilian from military targets. It just requires things like attacks causing serious bodily harm or death for politicial, religious or ideological purposes.

Update based on comments: As noted above kidnapping is not considered a valid tool of war. The rules of war require all captured enemy to be treated as POWs. As such, the hostage-taking part of the plan is legitimately classified as terrorist.
While the leaders, including the civilian leaders at the top who issue orders to troops in my opinion count as valid military enemies in war, the role of assassination in war has always been controversial. It is however, perhaps the archetypical move of an insurrection.

Again, if guilty, these men are evil and deserve the strongest punishment whether attacking parliament is terrorist or not. What’s important about this debate is that society is using the word terrorism to redefine our laws, and make laws that punish it more, and allow law enforcement infringements of civil rights in ways that would not be allowed against non-terrorist criminals. So we must make particular care in defining the term. In particular, I hope we can define the term in a way that our own actions, and past wartime actions we approve of, would not even resemble what we define as terrorism. Civilized governments and armies should never deliberately target innocents, which is why that’s the right place to draw the line. They do, however, engage in
guerilla actions, are born of insurrections, and send spies and sabateurs and assassins. They do blow up buildings with military value whether civilians in or nearby will be killed in the process. If we include such actions as terrorist, we should deplore them just as much when nations do them.

As I watch the immigration debate, I remain astounded at the views expressed by various sides. I am an immigrant to the USA, of course (of the legal type) so naturally I have some sympathies with immigrants, but the inconsistency of some viewpoints bothers me.

If you needed an argument for encouraging immigration, you should have been with me at Agenda in the year 2000. Agenda is a high-priced computer/internet industry executive conference (I used to be one). In that year, it was filled with all the people who were building all the hot new companies and the people running some of the older ones. The very people who were being held up as the engine of economic creation in the USA. That boom wilted a little bit, but there was still a lot of real stuff underneath.

Some high level government official was speaking and immigration came up. Another person at the lunch asked all those in the crowd who were born outside the USA to raise their hands. I would guess at least 60% of us raised our hands. Everybody knows that immigrants built the USA. What some people seem to have lost is that this never stopped. It’s going on just as much today.

Being anti-immigrant reminds me of racism, to use an inflamatory term. Racism is the belief that the broad circumstances of a person’s ancestry affect their worth as a person, and should affect their rights in society. Anti-immigrant nationalism is actually stronger. I was born 20 miles from the U.S. border, to parents also born there (though they were born to immigrant parents from Europe.) What moral code says that those like me deserve less of such fundamental rights as the ability to work, freedom to travel, freedom to live on my land, or to vote for those that will govern us? How can a few miles difference in birthplace morally command such a difference?

It can’t. People are not inherently superior or more or less worthy of human rights based on their parentage or the accidents of their birth. The reasons for sealed borders are entirely pragmatic, ends-justify-the-means reasons. But few are willing to admit that. This has become more true as societies move to offering not just rights but welfare and social support systems to people who live within them. No country can provide welfare to the world, so nations decide to set up an arbitrary rule (birth and parentage) to control who can get in to receive it. I’m not saying these pragmatic arguments aren’t real, just that we should admit what they are. When people get on soapboxes and decry Indians taking jobs from Americans, they seem to be saying that Indians are less worthy than Americans. That there is a moral reason we should contract for labour from people with the same ancestry or birth situation as ourselves over those who don’t share that. There is no such moral reason.

Addendum: I also think every country should encourage as many foreign students as it can. As my privacy sparring partner (but still friend) David Brin puts it, they send their children to our country and get infused with our values and ideas, and come to know us as human beings, and then some go home to spread those ideas — and they pay for this privilege. Who could possibly be against that?

Watching 60 minutes last night on the fact that in China’s new generation, there are 120 boys for every 100 women, due to the one-child-policy and the abortion of girls by those who insist on a son, an obvious answer came to me.

Instead of a one-child policy, have a one-son policy. Ie. after you have your first boy, you must stop. (China actually forces sterilization or insertion of an IUD under surveillance, which I obviously don’t think is a great way to do things.)

A one-son policy, would obviously increase the population pressure, since strice one-child means 1 child for every woman (though in practice it is not perfect, so it’s a bit more than that,) while one-son probably results in about 1.7 children per woman.

But in theory, there would be far less aborting of girls. There might be a cap of 3 children, which would mean that after 2 girls, the parents might consider abortion of a third, but this would apply to a much smaller fraction of pregnancies than it does today. In addition, a number of couples would stop with all girls after 2 or many times even 1, both because they can’t afford more children, or state pressure still pushes them to stop. The policy would actually be that one should still have only one child, but that draconian measures would not be taken on those who have daughters who insist on trying for a son.

The key is simply to present the easiest path. Right now aborting a child based on sex is illegal, it’s illegal for a doctor to tell the parents the sex of a child, and that would probably remain true. They just have to make it so that those daring enough to break the law to identify and then abort a girl would take the slightly easier, if perhaps more bureaucratic, path of having another child.

And of course, as long as you’re not aborting based on sex, you will get an even sexual balance no matter what rules you place on when to stop.

They need to do something. Lots of evidence suggests that a giant surplus of men who will never find women will sharply increase the crime rate and cause other problems. (Though perhaps it will cause revolution which would probably not be all bad.) Already one new nasty crime of desperation has sprung up — kidnapping girls, sometimes just as babies, to be future brides. I had hoped that being so valuable would increase the women’s power, but this may have been a false hope.

A search reveals I am not the only one with this idea, but it has not yet gathered much of a foothold. Both approaches are draconian, of course, and have no place in a free society.

Looking at printed wedding gift ribbon some time ago, Kathryn thought it would be amusing to put the 4th amendment on the ribbon, and tie it around our suitcases.

That turned out to be hard to make, but I did make a design for shipping tape which you can see below. The printed shipping tape has the text slant so that as the pattern repeats, the 4th amendment appears as a long continuous string, as well as a block.

You can put this shipping tape on your packages and your airplane luggage. Every time I fly, my luggage gets a card in it telling me how “for my protection” they have searched it.

Now, when they open my luggage, they will have to literally slice the 4th amendment in half in order to do this.

Too bad we can’t wrap it around our phone wires, but at least the EFF is suing AT&T to stop the NSA wiretaps.

We ordered several cases of this tape for the EFF. You can get it as a gift if you
join the EFF or buy it directly from the
EFF Store. There is a fat markup of course, which goes to protecting your civil rights. Buy some for your own shipping tape gun, or give the gift of privacy rights to a friend.

And yeah, I know it probably won’t stop them from searching. But if, like John Perry Barlow on his way back from Burning Man, I have to go to court over it, it will be nice to tell the judge that they cut the 4th amendment up to search my bags.

(Minor note: The printer could not always get the repetitions to line up perfectly, so sometimes there’s a vertical gap.)

Last night I was thinking to myself that we would probably see a big political todo when the war military death toll reaches 2749 — the number of people killed (not including the 10 suicide attackers) in the WTC on 9/11.

To my surprise, a little research showed we are well past the threshold. There have been 2221 U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq conflict. In addition as of November 1, there had been 428 U.S. civilian contractors killed according to labour dept. statistics. I don’t have figures for civilian deaths of the last 3 months or for non-contractor civilian war-related deaths.
(On an additional note, 191 U.S. military have died in the Afghan war. I don’t have U.S. civilian figures.) Also note 189 died at the Pentagon, and 40 on UA Flight 93.

That puts U.S. dead at around 2840, well over the WTC number and probably over the 2980 9/11 total when other civilians are added.

However, the hidden reality is that number was passed quite some time ago. That’s because fewer than 2100 Americans were killed in the WTC disaster. A quick search showed stats putting the number of U.S. dead in the WTC at 2106(back when they thought the total death toll was 2800 so it’s a little high.) And that’s the right number because all this counting of American dead in the Iraq war is disingenuous to the vastly greater numbers of Iraqi civilians and other nationals killed in the war and war-related violence. So if the focus is on U.S. citizen deaths, the war-on-terror deaths now far exceed the 9/11 deaths.

Now, I haven’t made any political comment on what this means, though I am sure others will. I just found it interesting the way the real numbers pan out, in contrary to what we see commonly reported.

One particularly interesting argument seen in the Underwatergate scandal is the one that the NYT, by revealing the existence of warrantless wiretaps on international communications lines, compromised national security.

Reporters asked how that can be. After all, surely the bad guys knew the U.S. had the ability to perform surveillance on them, and has a secret intelligence court, and was presumably getting lots of secret warrants to watch them, and was furthermore watching them overseas without being subject to the 4th amendment.

The White House response was effectively, "Well, we're catching some of them with this program. So obviously in spite of the fact that they should know we are listening, they forget, and we learn things." In other words, the bad guys are sometimes stupid, and by bringing a lot of publicity on the surveillance (legal or illegal) we're reminding them not to be stupid.

I've seen this issue talked about before. Many members of the mafia have been caught with wiretaps, saying things on phones that you think they would know are probably tapped. This argument is used to counter the claim that since encrypting communications are readily available (such as in Skype) the smart criminals will not get caught with wiretaps.

Furthermore, in this case, while the White House revealed only minimal details of the program, security experts in blogs and other media around the world engaged in all sorts of informed speculation about what's really going on. While the NYT didn't reveal any technical details, kernels in the discussion almost surely do.

I'm willing to accept that even the smart criminals make mistakes, and get caught this way, and this will continue. So indeed, heavy publicity around the surveillance techniques and issues probably does, as they claim, instruct or remind some bad guys not to use certain communications that could put them at risk for being caught.

The harder question is this: Does that imply we must keep silent on these issues? I think the answer is clearly no. The standard the spooks and White House suggest is untenable, and there is no clear way to draw the line. Because if we use the stupidity of criminals as a standard, then it's hard to see what public discourse might not be considered potentially harmful to the exploitation of the criminal's mistakes. Yes, it's clear to see that a massive public debate with constant articles in all major media is more likely to remind a bad guy to watch what he says on the phone, more than a single blog posting would. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind.

In the end, it's a security through obscurity argument of a particularly high order. Not only must we not let the bad guys know that we can wiretap, we must not remind them after it is presumed they already know. It's hard to imagine a rule against this that would not chill speech at an extreme level.

The AP reports that the DoJ is going to investigate the Underwatergate "leak" to the New York Times. Many of course wish they would investigate the program instead, but since the AG was involved in it, that's difficult.

But this puts forward the complex problem of how to deal with, and stop, illegal classified programs. Because they are classified, they lack many of the checks and balances that exist for other government operations. Indeed, it is suspected that many programs get classified entirely or in part in order to avoid scrutiny.

In theory, one does not have to obey an illegal order. But in practice it takes a lot of guys to defy one. And it's hard to be certain an order is illegal when your superiors and their lawyers are insisting it is.

Senator Rockefeller is one of the people elected to provide oversight over intelligence activities, and he was told about the NSA spying. He was also told he could not consult with the advisors he needed on technical and legal issues to make proper judgements. This is an unacceptable situation. There must be checks and balances.

I don't like secret courts, but they are better than having no courts at all. There should be a secret court with auditing power over all secret activities of the government. Anybody should be able to file a complaint with this court that the government is engaging in illegal secret activities. The identity of the whistleblower must be fully protected, as well. The court should have full power to investigate any and all classified and secret programs to find out if they are engaging in illegal activity. And it should have full power and duty to punish illegal activity by anybody, including the President. (Judgements against the President and other top officials would be subject to appeal by the Supreme Court.)

Furthermore, when the court finds wrongdoing, details of this wrongdoing should be declassified as soon as possible and as much as possible. Even at risk to national security. That's because illegal covert activities by the government are a greater risk to the security of the people and the nation than most disclosures are.

How much auditing of secret programs does the GAO get to do? Can its role be expanded? This seems more a judicial idea than a congressional one but there's no reason that auditing of illegal secret activity should not go on in all branches, of all branches.

Absent such a process, the leak to the New York Times is the only answer. The whistleblowers who revealed this program did the right thing for the nation, and should be rewarded, not punished.

A lot of new developments in the warrantless wiretap scandal. A FISA judge has resigned in disgust. A Reagan-appointed former DoJ official calls the President a clear and present danger. And the NSA admits they have on rare occasions tapped entirely domestic phone calls, because sometimes people calling to or from international cell phones while those phones are in the USA would see the traffic go overseas and come back again. I have made such calls to Europeans and Australians visiting the USA.

So they can’t spot those calls as domestic and thus are performing surveillance on them. But what about E-mail? With E-mail, it’s a great deal harder to identify where the parties are, and what citizenship they hold. In some cases, almost impossible.

And more to the point, E-mails between two U.S. persons will quite often go through international servers. Unlike phones, where it’s expensive, anybody who travels outside the USA for long enough to warrant an E-mail address out there can easily keep it and many do. There’s not even a big reason for multinational ISPs to avoid routing messages to servers in Canada or other places. I maintain aliases on my own domain for all my family, for example, though most of them are not in the same country as the server. I am not alone.

Further, it’s likely that the order of surveillance they have done on E-mail is vastly greater than on phones. For the NSA, monitoring of all unencrypted E-mail — all of it — would be only a modest amount of work. We used to joke in the old days about putting NSA traps in our messages, see this thread from 21 years ago on the topic, and many others if you search for it. If enough people put those in messages, it would overload the systems, we mused.

Back then we were mostly kidding around. Today we have reason to be scared. And it’s time to put opportunistic crypto into E-mail as I detailed years ago, by default. (Since then, some projects to do this have popped up — One from Simson Garfinkel and another from PGP. MS Outlook also does it, but with an untenable user interface.

One can read a fair bit between the lines. The reporters were really on the ball here, far more than one usually sees.

Particularly interesting notes include:

General Hayden of the NSA describes many reasons why they don’t use the FISA court, citing mostly “efficiency”

Reporters ask if they are listening for the word “bomb” — The AG says there is no blanket surveillance

The general states that the “physics” of the intercepts require one end be outside the USA

Independently, Senator Rockefeller’s letter where he wrote that he felt he needed “technical” advice to
understand the issues, and that it reminded him of Poindexter’s TIA is very telling.

The efficiency claim is a smokescreen. They would not have taken this level of legal risk, no matter
how much they feel what they did was legal, just to gain a little efficiency. It’s clear to me that
they are telling the truth when they say they could not use the FISA court — they are performing surveillance that the FISA court would not authorize for them.

The question is, what? The AG says it is not “blanket” but clearly there is some fancy computerized surveillance going on here, something secret, beyond Carnivore. I can readily believe that all sorts of fancy broad surveillance could take place and not be considered “blanket” by the AG. (The AG actually says, “The President has not authorized blanket surveillance of communications here in the United states.”) I certainly hope he has not authorized that. But has he authorized it on all communications coming in and out of the USA?

Or something less, like computer search of all E-mails or phone calls to or from entire towns or nations? Perhaps speaker recognition to look for certain people’s voices on all international calls, no matter what number they use? Perhaps looking for all arabic calls, and then doing blanket surveillance on them?

So much is possible, and all of this would not be authorized by the FISA court.

They knew they would get in legal trouble, so it’s also possible the intercepts, which the General says are on the international cables, are even placed outside the USA, either with or without the permission of foreign governments. (In extremes, they send submarines down to make taps.) Taps outside the USA are not under the rules of the wiretap act, though the 4th amendment still applies to US persons.

Spooky stuff. More to come.

P.S. If you have not been following it, it has now come out that the New York Times sat on this story for over a year, since before the 2004 election, whose outcome might have changed based on this news.

Major retail chains Target, Wal-Mart and others announced today they will end the so-called war on white people that had resulted in most stores posting signs welcoming “shoppers” or “customers” instead of “white patrons”, even though white people represented a considerable majority of their business.

“I’m white, and I’m here shopping for gifts for my white friends, and I’m offended that the store has been pressured into making some generic greeting that doesn’t reflect me.” said William O’ Reilly, a concerned caucasian shopper. “If they’re not going to welcome me and my race, I am going to take my business somewhere else.”

O’Reilly’s complaint, echoed by dozens, perhaps scores of other shoppers, has led the chains to alter their policies. Signs declaring “Look good with today’s colors” will be replaced next year with “Look good in colors designed for white skin.” The “Happy holidays” sign, recently changed to “Merry Christmas” will be further changed to “Merry Christmas for White America” to reflect the ethnicity and religion of 80% of the shoppers in the stores.